In mere 100 years from now, the Baltic coastline as we know it will be nothing more than a beautiful memory lost somewhere in history – according to the leading experts studying climate change. The melting glaciers will swallow up Swinoujscie, whilst turning Gdańsk into the modern day Atlantis and Poznan (the author’s hometown in the Western Poland) into a slowly submerging seaside resort town. 

In view of these predictions and out of sheer curiosity, Marcin Matuszak, Poznan-based designer and artist (accompanied by his friend, Tomasz Peukert – music producer who was collecting the field recordings), decided to walk along the entire current Polish seaside, to document the current state of it and to prepare a photo album from the material collected during the journey: “500km”. 

The project of the year-long walk, divided into 12 stages of several days was called “550 km” – as the estimated coastline of the Polish Baltic Sea. After walking the entire length, it turned out to be nearly 607 km from the German to the Russian border.

The project documents the Baltic Sea through four seasons, in the full sun and when it rains, with the wind and against the wind, with stormy horizons and calming sunsets. Against this backdrop, the sand, the shells, the seals, and also the cliffs breaking off with tree roots tell the story of the shifting coastline. 

The material presented, however, is not purely documentary. It is a photo record of a moment. A maximum of a three-second pause. A snapshot that cuts the future from the past.

Order here

Satisfaction: Consumption Art from the communist Poland of the 1970’s.

During the revitalization of avant-garde practices in 1970s Poland, a strain of artmaking emerged that applied Pop aesthetics to the unlikely subject matter of consumer identity in a Communist state, responding to a new initiative by the government that encouraged the private consumption of luxury goods in the service of a more modern socialism. The films that arose from this moment engage with absurd, colorful and even scandalous content. Informed by Marxist analyses of the Western culture industry, they examine the effects of a socialist-consumerist experiment through sensuous fantasies of desire and excess

2 x DVD, poster and booklet

Polish / English

D 25€

Buy it

Warsaw Modern by Czeslaw Olszewski, published by Fundacja Raster

This album of photographs by Czesław Olszewski is a unique cultural testament to the decade just prior to the outbreak of World War II. It is a fascinating voyage to the “Warsaw of the future” via the city’s modernist architecture.
The album is an attempt to revive the integrity of the Warsaw Architecture School of the interwar period. Yet it is also a narrative of the visionary modernist perspective, of how architecture creates a new spatial and aesthetic order, and how photography invokes an awareness of this order within us.
The album presents close to 300 archive photographs of selected architectural structures in Warsaw, including public buildings, residential estates and villas, as well as the modernised highways of the 1930s. These photographs were scanned from the original, glass negatives. When possible, the photographer’s original frames were restored on the basis of existing notes.
The album is preceded by an essay by Professor Marta Leśniakowska and Piotr Jamski, specialists at the Art Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). The text casts a closer look at the life and works of photographer Czesław Olszewski, and also explores the significance and specific character of architectural photography as a historical document.

Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Pages: 348

Buy It